The Real vs. The Ideal
Humans, because they are cursed with self-awareness, compare themselves to others to see if they are better off or worse off. We compare everything… income, social status, possessions, intelligence, humor, skin color, physique, and so forth. On just about everything and anything really. One of the main things we compare for is physical attractiveness and we do this compulsively from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, envy, and the normative discontent we all feel about our bodies (Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore,1984). For many people, this body unhappiness is the doorway to body image disturbance.
Social comparison theory states that when a person fails to find a valid source of objective information to help him or her compare themselves in some way to others—e.g., their opinions, characteristics, abilities—they will then gravitate to subjectively comparing themselves to others. Social comparisons deal with reinforcing one’s ego and self-esteem. People usually engage in downward social comparison by comparing ourselves to others who we perceive as being inferior to ourselves (Suls & Wheeler, 2012. The elderly often use this strategy to compare their current body conditions to those who are worse off in order to assuage their own body anxiety (Kaminski & Hayslip, 2006).
Self-discrepancy theory posits there are three types of self: the actual self which reflects what is, the ideal self which is an imaginary picture of what a person would like to be like, and the ought self which is an imaginary picture of the way person thinks they should be. One of the aims of self-discrepancy theory is to stimulate the emotional consequences of perceiving a discrepancy between one’s actual self and one’s ideal/ought selves. If the difference is not in a person’s favor, then they experience anxiety, dissatisfaction, embarrassment, guilt or shame, or depression (Perez, 2005; Suls & Wheeler, 2012; Vartanian, 2012).
The lion’s share of discrepancy studies undertaken over the past decades has focused on the discrepancies women feel about their body images. There is substantial evidence that the disconnect between a woman’s actual body-self and her ideal body self results in negative emotional responses. Typical of most of these studies were the use of measures showing a consistent pattern showing of desiring a thinner body (Vartanian, 2012). Women are more likely than men to objectify their bodies by taking an outsider’s perspective because of the omnipresent fixation upon the female body as a beauty object. Thus, they tend to engage in more self-critical evaluations of themselves than do men (Franzoi et al., 2012). There is little doubt that body image dissatisfaction increases when women upwardly compare their bodies to those who are more attractive. One experiment with 200 adult women who compared themselves to thin, athletic, and curvaceous bodies reveals that this increased their own body surveillance, lowered their body-self appreciation, and body self-esteem (Betz, Sabik, & Ramsey, 2019). While television is a strong force in objectifying women so are magazines and social media such as Facebook in which women compare themselves to images of their peers. One study asserts that Facebook and fashion magazines have a proportionately higher amount of appearance-related content than does television. Conversely, television programming and websites with explicitly sexually-objectifying images increase the self-objectification of its viewers (Fardouly et al., 2015).
Men, on the other hand, are harder to pin down than women. Most studies showed that men report less body image discrepancy than women, but these results suffered from systematic conflicts in the data. Some studies conclude that the ideal male body is the same as their current body size while others reveal that men view themselves as fatter than their ideal and still others show that men perceive their bodies as smaller than their ideal. An important element to consider for self-discrepancies among men is the nature of those discrepancies. Men’s actual/ideal self judgments are difficult to measure accurately because men may be just as likely to want to be thinner and leaner as they are while wanting to be bigger and more muscular. When test subjects report wanting these contrasting body forms then the discrepancy scores cancel one another resulting in compromised data. Studies assessing self-discrepancies of men and their actual muscularity report that they always prefer a muscular ideal body. And, like women, male discrepancy scores always correlate with body unhappiness and negative emotional responses (Vartanian, 2012).
There are three body areas people look at when comparing their bodies to those of others: face, body shape, and physical abilities. Men and women both self-objectify their bodies, but women do so far more than men (Oehlhof et al., 2009). Women are more likely than men to compare their faces and bodies to a female peer who they see as being either similar or better in the three body areas. Many women are prone to using upward social comparison when judging themselves to others. That is, they compare themselves to other women who are more attractive than themselves. Heterosexual men compare their bodies to those of others, but are far less self-critical than women. They also optimistically reassure themselves that even though they do not have the ideal shape right now they might in the future; an ego defense tactic based on an optimistic fantasy (Franzoi et al., 2012).
Bodily Unhappiness and the Brain
What happens in the brain when we compare our bodies to those of others especially those who are more attractive than ourselves? A small neuroimaging study of the brains of 18 women who viewed pictures of fashion models and then rated their own anxiety levels showed a great deal of brain activation. Their brains were so stimulated it now appears there is a body shape processing network within the brain. This network includes the activation of the lateral fusiform gyri in both hemispheres, right inferior parietal lobe, right lateral prefrontal cortex, and the left anterior cingulate cortex. Test subjects report increased anxiety while mentally comparing themselves to the more attractive models with different areas of brain becoming active including the bilateral basal ganglia, left amygdala, bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and left inferior lateral prefrontal cortex. Here is are the neural correlates of the consciousness of body dissatisfaction (Friederich et al., 2007).
Closing Thoughts
I think we need to wax philosophical over these findings as there’s really not much we can do about age, shape, organ size, and oftentimes weight. First, body image dissatisfaction is the psychological and cultural norm held around the world (Tantleff-Dunn, Barnes, & Larose, 2011). This body unhappiness is self-inflicted by the adherence to imaginary ideals—most of them so unrealistic they are impossible to reach if rationally analyzed. Our bodily unhappiness stems from a resistance in the human psyche to accept what is is and what is not is not. Somatic despair seems to be very much part of the human condition. That’s a very troubling thing to think about.
Humans place themselves in somatopsychic traps by their own free will and then discover they cannot escape them. But this does not mean they are inescapable, far from it. Most people just need to find their own way out, but won’t do so until they have reached a psychological low-point. The good news is that the solution lies in learning self-acceptance, self-compassion, and bodymindfulness, but I leave this discussion for a future time.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Betz, D., Sabik, N., & Ramsey, L. (2019). Ideal comparisons: Body ideals harm women’s body image through social comparison. Body Image 29, p. 100-109.
Fardouly, J., Diedrichs, P., Vartanian, L., & Halliwell, E. (2015). The mediating role of appearance comparisons in the relationship between media usage and self-objectification in young women. Psychology of Women Quarterly 39(4), p. 447-457.
Franzoi, S., Vasquez, K., Sparapani, E., & Martin, J. (2012). Exploring body comparison tendencies: Women are self-critical whereas men are self-hopeful. Psychology of Women Quarterly 36(1), p. 99-109.
Friederich, H., Uher, R., Brooks, S., Giampietro, V., Brammer, M., Williams, S., Herzog, W., Treasure, J., & Campbell, I. (2007). I’m not as slim as that girl: Neural bases of body shape self-comparison to media images. NeuroImage 37, p. 674-681.
Kaminski, P. & Hayslip, B. (2006). Gender differences in body esteem among older adults. Journal of Women & Aging 18(3), p. 19-35.
Oehlhof, M., Musher-Eizenman, D., Neufeld, J., & Hauser, J. (2009). Self-objectification and ideal body shape for men and women. Body Image 6, p. 308-310.
Perez, J. (2005). An investigation of body image dissatisfaction in homosexual and heterosexual males. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 66(1-B), 620.
Rodin, J., Silberstein, L., & Striegel-Moore, R. (1984). Women and weight: A normative discontent. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 32, p. 267–307.
Suls, J. & Wheeler, L. (2012) Social comparison theory. In P. Van Lange, A. Kruglanski, & Tory Higgins, E. (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, Vol. I. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, p. 460-481.
Tantleff-Dunn, S., Barnes, R., & Larose, J. (2011). It’s not just a “woman thing:” The current state of normative discontent. Eating Disorders 19(5), p. 392-402.
Vartanian, L. (2012). Self-discrepancy theory and body image. In T. Cash (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance, Vol. II. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 711-717.
Updated on 11-11-23